Sorry, Kellie Maloney, but to be a woman you must first be a girl

Anybody with an ounce of compassion would have been doffing caps in recent days to Frank Maloney — as, indeed, absolutely everybody with an ounce of compassion vigorously and noisily was. His announcement that he is undergoing a sex change has been met by plaudits from far and wide, notably from within the muscularly male world of boxing in which he made his name and from where his former client, Lennox Lewis, has led the cheerleading. Quite right, too. Maloney’s appalling, sometimes suicidal misery of half a century is beyond imagination; his eventual admission to his beloved wife was heartbreaking to read and his courage, now, in going public — albeit forced by the threat of media exposure — is admirable.

But… oh yes, there is a but. As news reporters and commentators dutifully swivelled overnight to refer to the retired promoter as ‘she’, Maloney explained that, ‘I wasn’t born into the right body. I have always known I was a woman.’ With every other due respect, Maloney has never been a woman. Nor — surgery, chemicals, counselling and coaching notwithstanding — will he ever be a woman. He might wish it to be so; he might feel it to be so; nevertheless, wishes and feelings do not make it so.

We have developed, by and large, an admirably liberal stance on transsexuals — certainly when compared with our collective take on other poor souls who would prefer their bodies to be other than they are. We give short shrift to sufferers of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID, also known as amputee identity disorder). This is a very real and recognised condition, an extreme body dysmorphia where people are so certain that they should not have been born with, say, two arms or legs that they will go to such lengths as laying an offending limb before an approaching train.